Haul Of Legendarily Bad ET Game Cartridges Sells For $105,000

A haul of games made by Atari – including hundreds of copies of ET The Extraterrestrial, often dubbed the worst video game of all time – have sold on eBay for $105,000 (£68,000).

The cache of game cartridges were found last year in a New Mexico landfill site, following extensive detective work by Joe Lewandowski, a waste management expert and historian.

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The search for the dumped games, long thought to be an urban myth amongst the gaming community, was made into the documentary ‘Atari: Game Over’, released last year by filmmaker Zak Penn.

The ET cartridges were among 881 games to go on sale, with other titles including Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede and Super Breakout.

One of the ET games, which was in its original box, sold for $1537 (£981).

Meanwhile, 23 of the games were sold to museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington and the Deutsches Film Museum in Frankfurt.

The city of Alamogordo in New Mexico, where the games were found, will receive $65,000 of the money raised through the auction.

Lewandowski added that there were more games to be sold from the huge find.

“There’s 297 we’re still holding in an archive that we’ll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them,” he said.

“But for now we’re just holding them.”

100 of the games were sold late last year, making $37,000.

The ET game has long held a place in computer gaming folklore following its release in 1982.

It was made by the ailing Atari company in 1982 as a tie-in with Steven Spielberg’s movie, but only 34 days were spent developing it.

When it was released, it became one of the biggest flops in video game history, many dubbing it the worst game of all time.

But millions of copies were made, with Atari eventually burying many hundreds of thousands at the landfill site in Almagordo.

James Heller, who was the manager of Atari at the time and oversaw the burial of the games, was among those there during the excavation in April this year.

The failure of the game is often cited as one of the reasons Atari eventually liquidated in 1984, following its pioneering boom years in the 1970s.

Image credits: Atari/AP